StartAtTheEnd

Karma: 351

Crocker’s rules.
I’m nobody special, and I wouldn’t like the responsibility which comes with being ‘someone’ anyway.
Reading incorrect information can be frustrating, and correcting it can be fun.

My writing is likely provocative because I want my ideas to be challenged.
I may write like a psychopath, but that’s what it takes to write without bias, consider that an argument against rationality.

Finally, beliefs don’t seem to be a measure of knowledge and intelligence alone, but a result of experiences and personality. Whoever claims to be fully truth-seeking is not entirely honest.

StartAtTheEnd 9 Dec 2025 13:28 UTC
−3 points
0
in reply to: Karl Krueger’s comment on: The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe
Good and evil are naive concepts which break down once you start thinking about them and questioning them. Moral relativism is not one of many valid views, it’s a logical conclusion.
The post criticizes how every age believes that they’ve figured out what’s good, even though they’re clearly flawed from the perspective of other ages. But the same thing is true when moralizers decide that “X is obviously bad and we all agree” because X feels bad, despite a complete lack of effort to challenge this belief. Morality is like religion in that it inhibits thought, and I think they’re both cultural immune systems against various issues. We shouldn’t do away with morality, but morality is too naive, and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Morality is mostly poor assumptions like “X is bad”, and the amount of effort which goes into the evaluation usually amounts to “yep, X makes me feel bad, case closed”. If discrimination is bad, we’ll have to do away with exams and drivers licenses. I think we need to look at the second or third-order effects of anything in order to even begin judging if it’s good or bad. You cannot simply stop at the first step and not feel responsible because your life choices only lead to death further down the chain of cause and effect (e.g. veganism also requires the death of animals, just less directly)
To be brief, there are no good or bad things that one ought to maximize or minimize, there’s only trade-offs to make and balances to find. Nothing is purely good/virtuous or bad/evil, these terms cannot be decoupled from context.
But it’s true that systems cannot properly evaluate themselves from the inside. It’s only when you have an external reference point that you can do so. In 100 years, we can look back at 2025, and then we may discover that we deem our current society to have had moral catastrophes. But there’s no one true reference frame

StartAtTheEnd 9 Dec 2025 0:23 UTC
3 points
0
on: Your Digital Footprint Could Make You Unemployable
As you said, Claude tore you to shreds. I think “if you’re a dickhead online, you can still be prevented from being hired” is a dangerous meme. It assumes that anyone who is affected by this modern social credit system is a bad human being, when the truth is that every actual human being has done something which can make them look bad. The only reason this problem isn’t 100 times worse is that the world isn’t yet legible enough for us to gather and interpret this data automatically. In fact, you’ve hit upon one of the solutions—the destruction of data (or even better: not recording it in the first place). These laws only make sense for our public life, private life is (warning:politics) very different. There is no legible solution to the conflict between laws and human freedom, there’s only obscurity, illegibility, unenforceability, separation of information, and the bottleneck in moderation (which is now being dissolved by AI moderation). By the way, I’m aware there’s a minority of people (mostly oversocialized moralizers and workaholics) who can tolerate living their entire life in the public sphere, and that they will not be able to empathize with my worries. “People will be forced to be moral, what’s wrong with that?”
As your private life is increasingly nested inside of infrastructure (not deemed utility under Section 230) which is owned by private companies, the private sphere of your life will shrink as the territory is eaten (the ratio of territory which is neutral or owned by yourself will shrink towards zero). This is all going to get much worse in 5-10 years, I know because I’ve been pro freedom/privacy for more than 15 years, and I’ve always understimated how bad things would get.
Maybe once I become financially independent
Perhaps, as long as you don’t have any opinions which can get you debanked

StartAtTheEnd 8 Dec 2025 23:32 UTC
0 points
−6
on: The Possibility of an Ongoing Moral Catastrophe
If nobody perceives this evil, then it does not exist. If anything, bringing attention to something which is happening, and then deeming it evil, would increase the total suffering of the world for making people suffer from something that they would otherwise have ignored.
Society needs every cog of the system, it needs everything from simple jobs to highly respected jobs. Every part is important. Suffering starts when you start telling half the population “Your position is low, this makes you a loser, this makes you a failure, and it makes you worth less”. Suffering is not a function of objective states, but of their interpretation. Halving the net suffering of the world by changing our perceptions of it is trivial compared to making everyones lives better in an objective sense.
There’s also no absolute good or evil. Things which are “somewhat evil” might be protecting against bigger evils. Two examples: Parents force their children to do homework, and this is painful, but it’s also for their own benefit and acts to prevent future evils. “Helicopter parenting” is virtue gone wrong, as one does harm in the attempt to minimize harm.
I believe that many ongoing “evils” are chesterton’s fences. Perhaps socities which did not engage in evils do not exist anymore because they destroyed themselves with their virtues. Everything good is costly, after all. This is not a problem to be solved, it’s life. If one finds life to be a problem, then their philosophy is wrong—their map says that the territory needs to be different for life to be enjoyable, and this interpretation harms their enjoyment.
Lastly, our moral reflections are worth nothing. Plenty of large companies are making the world a worse place because it’s profitable for them, we don’t need any more reflection to conclude this. But the conclusion has no power as the rich have succeeded in subverting the values of society towards consumerism and the like. And only humans working in companies can be moral, but individuals only have freedom of choice in smaller companies. In larger companies, everyone is just following orders, or some law which forces them to maximize shareholder profit, which we know conflicts with moral principles (this is the problem with Moloch).
What personally bothers me is the lack of humanity in the modern world, not the evil. To be precise, the modern world is not that evil (malicious), it’s completely indifferent. Slavery, genocides and conquests would be an improvement (a step towards humanity). The suffering is not a problem, those who grow up in harsher times will create more solid mental defenses and more stoic interpretations of life, so the average level of suffering (or rather, net suffering) is unlikely to change very much. But like farm and zoo animals, we won’t get to experience the authentic life that our forefathers were capable of experiencing.

StartAtTheEnd 25 Nov 2025 14:18 UTC
−2 points
0
on: I’ll be sad to lose the puzzles
Exactly, losing and winning are equivalent, they both mark the end of the game. This sort of Buddhist conclusion that the destruction of everything is preferable to a bit of negative emotion is mere pathology. We could make new challenges in a “solved” world, but people would cheat using AI just like they’re cheating by using AI now. With the recent increases in cognitive off-loading, I predict that a vast majority will ruin the game for themselves because they can’t stop themselves from cheating, for the same reason that they can’t stop themselves from scrolling Tiktok all day (hedonism stemming from a lack of meaning).
The hope for this kind of victory is also extremely naive (and sort of cute). I think it’s a cognitive bias—the one that makes people think that their commust utopia is possible, makes Musk think he will be living on mars in the future, and makes Christians think that Jesus could return any day now. Most modern problems are amplified by technological advancements, but we expect even more tech to solve all our problems even when the dangers of technology are 10 times more obvious than when Kaczynski warned us? That’s like losing half your money at a casino and then betting the other half. I don’t want to be forced into such a nihilistic self-destruction, which I recognize as a symptom of technology in the first place (life is less meaningful because we have less agency).
The more you meditate on the optimal design for the world, the more your utopian world will look like the world which already exists. Only a child goes “Why don’t we just give everyone a lot of money?”, and the more we mature, the more “bad” things we will recognize as good. “Puzzles are fun!”, “Games are more fun if you discover the solutions yourself”, “Exercise and other unpleasant things are healthy”, “If things come too easily, we take them for granted”, and so on. Keep going, and you will reconcile with suffering too. Nerds are trying to solve psychological problems using math and logic, and they’re just as awkward and unsuccessful as philosophers, and for the same reasons. But I’m afraid that nerds have become smart enough that they could bring an end to the game, and it’s a strange choice, as learning how to enjoy the game would actually be easier.

StartAtTheEnd 21 Nov 2025 7:18 UTC
17 points
9
on: Dominance: The Standard Everyday Solution To Akrasia
I really, really dislike other people telling me what to do. In fact, I’ve sometimes done things because other people told me that I couldn’t do them (motivation through pride) or shouldn’t do them (motivation through spite). I think this goes for a lot of intelligent people, unless they are working for something which aligns with their values, or for people who they like. I’m often more motivated to help my friends than I am to help myself.
So, this solution works for most people, but it doesn’t generalize to people like myself who have a high need of agency and feel unfairly compensated (being twice as good of a worker rarely results in twice the salary). And I think this problem is at its worst when I interpret the actions I must take in my life as originating from the outside (society saying I need to work) rather than as being my own choice (Me choosing to work because I think it’s best).
Alternative sources of motivation I’ve seen work in other people is morality (e.g. wanting the world to be better), hopes/dreams for the future (this is vulnerable to doubt, however), the sense of duty, sheer love for the work at hand, and putting oneself in a sitaution with no way out except doing the work. Alternative causes of Akrasia I’ve seen are disillusionment/nihilism, perfectionism, and fear (fear of pain, risk, the unknown, and of the feeling of cognitive load). Apathy and nihilism are both harmful to motivation as motivation is rooted in meaning and emotion.
I personally recommend decreasing ones scope of consideration to the local, where one has the most agency, and surrounding oneself with people who care a lot, as this repairs disillusionment over time

StartAtTheEnd 21 Nov 2025 6:30 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: StartAtTheEnd’s Shortform
It doesn’t require conscious or direct coordination, but it does require a chain of cause and effect which affects many people. If society agrees that chasing after material goods rather than meaningful pursuits is bad taste, then the world will become less molochian. It doesn’t matter why people think this, how the effect is achieved, or if people are aware of this change. Human values exist in us because of evolution, but we may accidentally destroy them with technology, through excessive social competition, or through eugenics/dysgenics.
I don’t think rules make people better. One doesn’t become virtuous because we make it impossible for them to break the law, true virtue is when you have the freedom to do evil but choose not to. This sounds like mere philosophy, but values are in an entirely different category than rules. Value judgements and facts are necessarily unrelated, values cannot be derived, deduced or otherwise calculated, they’re arbitrary and axiomatic. In fact, AGIs cannot have values, they can only act as if they do.
the punishment could be stronger
I probably did not exlain myself well enough. People get away with bad things because there’s loopholes in the law which doesn’t get punished because they’re technically okay. You cannot cover all attack vectors, because you cannot calculate all of them.
If you did manage to find the, say 20 million different attack vectors of a system, then you’d need to defend against 20 million actions. But perhaps 19 million of these actions are already done by perfectly innocent people, for perfectly innocent reasons, and if you start going after those who exploit these vectors, then you will also start harming innocent people who don’t even know of these attack vectors. (example: In some states, collecting rain water is illegal)
Innocent behaviour and malicious behaviour overlaps, with no easy way to discern the two. Then you will either have to punish innocent people, or leave the attack vector open. If you leave open too many attack vectors, exploitation will become the norm and degrade society entirely. If you keep closing the attack vectors, then human freedom will tend towards zero over time, which also means that mutually beneficial actions between individuals will tend towards zero

StartAtTheEnd 17 Nov 2025 18:38 UTC
−1 points
−1
on: StartAtTheEnd’s Shortform
The nature of exploitation and the ratio of bad states to good states makes it impossible for a good future to exist in a highly rational society. This is because rationality leads to Moloch. The reason not all of human history has been terrible is due to how good taste prunes Molochian elements by assigning them a lower value, or directly preventing ways of thinking which leads to the discovery of such strategies in the first place. Laws and ethics are insufficient because the attack/defense asymmetry cannot be overcome. There’s no difference between felling the rainforest, scamming old people, or using research to improve your dating profile. That some people will disagree with the latter is my argument that this community values “optimality” in a molochian manner.
Destruction is so much easier than creation that it cannot be defended against, which means that the set of possible worlds is constrained by its agents. Many destructive actions allows the agent to extract some value for itself in the process. If the agents lack good taste, then there exists no set of laws or principles which can save them.
Irrational agents can build worlds that rational agents can not, and some of these irrational worlds are superior from a human perspective (the average human—not necessarily the reader which has spent years dismantling their natural tendencies)

StartAtTheEnd 9 Nov 2025 21:54 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Aprillion’s comment on: Pythia
I think the problem with Moloch is one of one-pointedness, similar to metas in competitive videogames. If everyone has their own goals and styles, then many different things are optimized for, and everyone can get what they personally find to be valuable. A sort of bio-diversity of values.
When, however, everyone starts aiming for the same thing, and collectively agreeing that only said thing has value (even at the cost of personal preferences) - then all choices collapse into a single path which must be taken. This is Moloch. A classic optimization target which culture warns against optimizing for at the cost of everything else is money. An even greater danger is that a super-structure is created, and that instead of serving the individuals in it, it grows at the expense of the individuals. This is true for “the system”, but I think it’s a very general Molochian pattern.
Strong optimization towards a metric quickly results in people gaming said metric, and Goodhart’s law kicks in. Furthermore, “selling out” principles and good taste, and otherwise paying a high price in order to achieve ones goals stops being frowned upon, and instead becomes the expected behaviour (example: Lying in job-interviews is now the norm, as is studying things which might not interest you).
But I take it you’re refering to the link I shared rather than LW’s common conception of Moloch. Consciousness and qualia emerged in a materialistic universe, and by the darwinian tautology, there must have been an advantage to these qualities. The illusion of coherence is the primary goal of the brain, which seeks to tame its environment. I don’t know how or why this happened, and I think that humans will dull their own humanity in the future to avoid the suffering of lacking agency (SSRIs and stimulants are the first step), such that the human state is a sort of island of stability. I don’t have any good answers on this topic, just some guesses and insights:
1: The micro dynamics of humanity (the behaviour of individual people) are different from the macro mechanics of society, and Moloch emerges as the number of people n tends upwards. Many ideal things are possible at low n’s almost for free (even communism works at low n!), and at high n’s, we need laws, rules, regulations, customs, hierarchical structures of stablizing agents, etc etc—and even then our systems are strained. There seems to be a law similar to the square-cube law which naturally limits the size things can have (the solution I propose to this is decentralization)
2: Metrics can “eat” their own purpose, and creations can eat their own creators. If we created money in order to get better lives, this purpose can be corrupted so that we degrade our lives in order to get more money. Morality is another example of something which was meant to benefit us but now hangs as a sword above our heads. AGI is trivially dangerous because it has agency, but it seems that our own creations can harm us even if they have no agency whatsoever (or maybe agency can emerge? Similar to how ideas gain life memetically).
3: Perhaps there can exist no good optimization metrics (which is why we can’t think of an optimization metric which won’t destroy humanity when taken far enough). Optimization might just be collapsing many-dimensional structures into low-dimensional structures (meaning that all gains are made at an expense, a law of conservation). Humans mostly care about meeting needs, so we minimize thirst and hunger, rather than maximizing water and food intake. This seems like a more healthy way to prioritize behaviour. “Wanting more and more” seems like a pathology than natural behaviour—one seeks the wrong thing because they don’t understand their own needs (e.g. attempting to replace the need for human connection with porn), and the dangers of pathology used to be limited because reality gatekept most rewards behind healthy behaviour. I don’t think it’s certain that optimality/optimization/self-replication/cancer-like-growth/utility are good-in-themselves like we assume. They’re merely processes which destroy everything else before destroying themselves, at least when they’re taking to extremes. Perhaps the lesson is that life ceases when anything is taken to the extreme (a sort of dimensional collapse), which is why Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence even here.

StartAtTheEnd 8 Nov 2025 23:03 UTC
12 points
3
on: Pythia
This problem can also be modeled as the battle against pure replicators. What Nick Land calls the shredding of all values is the tendency towards pure replicators (ones which do not value consciousness, valence, and experience). This seems similar to the religious battle against materialism.
Bluntness outcompetes social grace, immorality outcompetes morality, rationality outcompetes emotion, quantity outcompetes quality (the problem of ‘slop’), Capitalism outcompetes Buddhism and Taoism, intellectualism outcompetes spiritualism and religion, etc.
The Retrocausality reminds me of Roko’s basilisk. I think that self-fulfilling prophecies exist. I originally didn’t want to share this idea on LW, but if Nick Land beat me to it, then I might as well. I think John Wheeler was correct to assume that reality has a reflexive component (I don’t think he used this word, but I’m going to). We’re part of reality, and we navigate it using our model of reality, so our model is part of the reality that we’re modeling. This means that the future if affected by our model of the future. This might be why placebo is so strong, and why belief is strong in general.
While I think Christopher Langan is a fraud, I believe that his model of reality has this reflexive axiom. If he’s at least good at math, then he probably added this axiom because of its interesting implications (which sort of unifies competing models of reality. For instance, the idea of manifestation which is gaining popularity online)

StartAtTheEnd 4 Nov 2025 22:36 UTC
1 point
1
in reply to: Fiora Sunshine’s comment on: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study
Thank you.
Some people do seek beauty. Beauty has a similar effect to cuteness, people who look good are generally treated better. People probably prefer traits which “feel like them”, and traits which they have a natural advantage at. The goal is to bring out as many real aspects of yourself as you can, and to make them as appealing as possible. Being forced to roleplay as something you’re not is painful, and losing yourself in the process of fitting into a group will make you feel empty. Society is generally correct about this problem, but I think that artistic skills is sufficient to solve it.
I think self-worth is a factor, as you say, but I expect most people to have a hard time accepting themselves unless they can find a community which accepts them.
Finally, yes, suffering can push one towards either extreme. Fetishism also has this dual component—somebody who was abused might become a masochist, but another possibility is that they will search for a partner who is extremely gentle. It depends which side wins the battle, so to speak.
Successful reinforcement learning requires being around people with better taste than yourself, or consuming material made by people with better taste. Sometimes I worry that individuals with good taste might instead be harmed by their environment (I’m friends with a vtuber. I know that her chat will have inappropriate comments, and I know that sexual topics will be rewarded with more engagement). In an abstract sense, I think people want to increase their value, and that graceful behaviour is behaviour which protects value (and treats things as if they have value in order to reinforce the illusion that they have value—the polar opposite of vulgarity/blasphemy/profanity)

StartAtTheEnd 4 Nov 2025 20:47 UTC
1 point
0
on: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study
I agree with basically all of this. Cuteness is a social strategy and defense. I once watched a video which jokingly suggested that cats domesticated humans, using their cuteness as a psychological weapon. But isn’t that fairly close to the truth?
I once reflected on “How do less intelligent people survive in this world?”. I’m a quick learner who take pride in being independent, and even I think life is difficult, so how do regular people cope?
I recently came across this book quote online: “The voice belonged to a plump round-faced woman of the sort that develops a good personality because the alternative is suicide.” In short, “become likable” is the answer.
It hit me quite hard, not only because it put it so bluntly, but because I’m familiar with the sort of people who are pleasant to be around because their past is filled with misfortune and suffering. I think there’s a lot of truth to statements like “There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth”. We create light in order to cope with the darkness, and we like others to the extent that they make life seem more appealing. The reason Japan has so much Slice of Life anime is because of ‘black companies’.
I love cute things myself, also for non-sexual reasons. But it’s not uncommon that trauma and unmet needs result in fetishism and hypersexual behaviour which attempts to fill these needs (often without success—no amount of casual sex will make you feel loved). There’s also a correlation between vulgarity, porn addiction and chronic internet use, and I dislike most of these people because they cannot emulate beautiful things well enough to deceive me (because they project aspects of themselves into their artwork). There is both healthy and unhealthy behaviour involved in these dynamics.

StartAtTheEnd 4 Nov 2025 19:17 UTC
0 points
0
in reply to: SarahNibs’s comment on: Why I Transitioned: A Case Study
I’ve read that autistic people (who tend to have poor introspective abilities) are about 10 times more likely to be trans. The whole topic is related to crisis of identity, and young people naturally engage in self-discovery in ways which are easily disturbed by peer pressure. With post-modernism dissolving the traditional labels with which people of the past could identify themselves, I think it’s natural that identity has become more fluid. I also think it’s quite common for people to rebel in a way which isn’t true rebellion, but rather just the appearance of such (we’re social creatures, so if we don’t fit into mainstream communities, we tend to find niches. But this is still a kind of conformity. True non-conformity is much more rare).
I have to disagree with your idea that trans people are hurt by conforming. There has been a great increase in transsexualism as a result of transsexualism becoming socially acceptable. There seems to be a bit of a bandwagon effect, similar to the self-diagnosis of neurodivergency caused by TikTok.
The biggest reason for taking the theory of autogynephilia seriously is that it’s sexual in nature. Your explanation would explain transsexualism, but not the things which with it correlates. Transsexual people fixate more on sexual aspects of life, as do homosexuals and furries. Non-standard sexual orientations are more involved in fetishism. There’s more correlations which will seem even stranger if your model doesn’t include deep psychological mechanisms. For instance, all three group mentioned previously seem more likely than average people to prefer strong or unnatural colors. There are even times where I can guess somebodies sexual tendencies on the art styles which they draw or are drawn to. Similar to this, so I’m not the only one who has picked up on these correlations. I also believe that it’s these correlations which gives certain labels their negative connotations. People don’t care what genitals you prefer, what gender you feel like, or what your skin color or hair color is, but if they’ve met other people who shared these traits with you, then you will be judged according to the behaviour of those who share said traits with you).

StartAtTheEnd 4 Nov 2025 16:53 UTC
5 points
2
on: The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect
Intelligence cannot be boiled down to a single number, but it can be boiled down to about five numbers. If you gave somebody who was unable to grasp high levels of abstraction inhuman processing speed (say, 15 standard deviations), then this qualitative difference would not make a quantitative difference (so FSIQ scores aren’t equal, the subtests which result in the final score are important, too). Also, the intelligence distribution is a bit weird than our models suggest, which is why geniuses can be so far apart from eachother. Nikola Tesla could visualize his designs in 3D space, just how many bits of information could this visual working memory of his contain? The standard deviation of working memory items is roughly 1, so even 50 items ‘should’ only appear in one in 10^400 people.
I don’t believe much in super-intelligence, but I have recently had the horrifying thought that most plans have a threshold on required intelligence, and that further intelligence doesn’t make much of a difference (In short, that scaling is unreasonably effective). This means that an AI with 140~ IQ and 100000 times more actions per second than a human, could take over the world, even if I could beat it at some IQ test subsets. That competitive RTS game players aim to improve their APS (actions per second) speaks in favor of this idea.
Is there any reason you make Humman so obviously wrong and dislikable? If any reader believes something that Humman does, I think they will feel offended and close the page before they to read the counter-arguments to the beliefs he represents.
Ideally, by the way, we’d gatekeep things like AI research in a manner that people like Humman will be barred from entering. There are classes in topics like security and biology which are good at destroying many of the naive arguments Humman represents in the post.
Finally, beliefs like “everyone is born with the same amount of stat points” are spread even in Harvard (e.g. Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences) and it’s downstream from the social instincts which guard against outliers. The hard sciences are getting less hard by the year because of ideological, political and social dynamics, and these are directly responsible for the poor general understanding of intelligence. Human beings fail to understand AGI because they anthropomorphize it (they consider their own humanity axioms that all systems are bound by).

StartAtTheEnd 3 Nov 2025 20:23 UTC
4 points
−13
on: Lack of Social Grace is a Lack of Skill
Social grace cannot co-exist with truth seeking, they’re at conflict. But some truths can be communicated gracefully. “Saying something nicely” is often just stating the truth with a lower magnitude. “I hate that → It’s not really my cup of tea”. The vector is the same, the magnitude is smaller. It’s like whispering rather than yelling.
Edit: People here are rather mathematical, and truth seeking doesn’t see much resistance in math because it’s so neutral. Try digging up human bio diversity research or any other controversial topic. What, you think I’m just a bad person? That would imply that all unpleasant conclusions are false, and that people who hold them merely have unpleasant values. As if moral thinking is a good heuristic, and ad hominem not a fallacy? That I’m agree downvoted already proved my point.
But the lack of social grace is not a lack of skill—well it is, but more precisely it’s a lack of sensitivity (and therefore granularity). One is socially tone deaf in the same way that they’re musically tone deaf. The more different tones you can differentiate, the more subtle differences you can pick up.
People who lack social grace lack this subtlety. Their social landscape is more coarse—perhaps some dimensions are even missing from it. If something registers weakly for us, we assume it registers weakly to others (people who have poor hearing often speak too loudly). But one can also ruin their sensivity (their social taste), by calibrating it poorly. This damage is often done by strong stimuli, which reorder the scale which is compared against (If more bits are used for the exponent of a floating point variable, less bits can be used for the precision).
Somebody who drenches their food in chili-sauce is less likely to be able to taste if they’re drinking cheap wine or expensive wine. Porn addicts often judge the appropriateness of sexual behaviour poorly. If you’re used to people who use strong language, the baseline of what you consider rude speech may be out of sync with others. I also imagine that watching too much anime might ruin somebodies calibration, since a lot of things in anime are exaggerated (down to facial expressions—which may be why a lot of autistic people are drawn to anime).
More general intelligence is less restrained (that’s what general means), but social grace, manners, norms, etc. are primarily restrictions. For instance, the overton window is the acceptable space of ideas. Intelligent people can often “emulate” bounded behaviour, but they’re at a disadvantage within the bounded area (which is why being street smart might outperform being book smart). Finally, many intellectuals don’t get the importance of context (they prefer the world to follow general rules which are true in all contexts)

StartAtTheEnd 2 Nov 2025 12:45 UTC
1 point
−2
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: An Opinionated Guide to Privacy Despite Authoritarianism
I have more than 200 passwords now I think, and I’m starting to forget some of them. A password manager would probably be ideal if it could run completely locally, so that it’s not an online service, but rather a cryptographic program which uses a master key to generate sub-keys.
There’s an article with some criticism of Brave here. It looks like it’s written by somebody who has been on the internet too long and who doesn’t trust anyone or anything, but that’s exactly what I like about it.
Speaking of which, I don’t like the mindset “Oh well, you can’t avoid all these tech giants, so you might as well give up and let them collect whatever they want”. Almost all “alternative browsers” are just Chromium or Firefox under the hood, and almost all “alternative search engines” are just Google proxies (metasearch engines).
There’s enough information out there to uniquely identify like 95% of users across almost all services, but our footprints are just considered noise, the FBI doesn’t care if somebody downloads a song without paying for it. Now, consider what will happen once AIs can process all of it, and each person can be assigned a “digital FBI agent” to watch over them

StartAtTheEnd 1 Nov 2025 17:29 UTC
10 points
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: An Opinionated Guide to Privacy Despite Authoritarianism
Bitwarden does seem more local than I initially assumed. I modeled it as trusting another entity with ones master key. Ideally, all reliance on external services shouldn’t require you to trust them, it should be mathematically impossible for them to betray you by design. A purely mechanical lock, for instance, cannot be hacked remotely. Self-hosting is superior to trusting other services, and the open source nature reduces the chance that it’s backdoored by quite a lot.
Mathematically, If I have one unique password that nobody else knows or can know (because it’s never used on any websites), and I use that to generate other passwords in an irreversible manner, then I can get away with remembering just one password, while still using hundreds of unique passwords on different websites. This might be what bitwarden does, in which case the only causes of concerns left are hardware backdoors and quantum computers. Doesn’t get much better than that

StartAtTheEnd 1 Nov 2025 17:21 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: An Opinionated Guide to Privacy Despite Authoritarianism
I should have been more clear what I meant here. “It’s possible with more than just locations” means that, just like you can uniquely identify any location on the planet if you can extract enough bits of information out of a picture, one can uniquely identify people if they can find log2(human population) ≈ 33 unique bits of information on them. Gender, for instance, is one bit of information

StartAtTheEnd 30 Oct 2025 19:11 UTC
−5 points
−19
on: An Opinionated Guide to Privacy Despite Authoritarianism
I don’t know about others, but I was a little put off by the mention of “password managers” in the beginning since that’s handling over the keys of your privacy to external powers. This hurt my expectations of the rest of the essay. It might be good, but I don’t think it could teach me anything new. By the way, at first I thought reading your essay would cost money. You might want to reword the tier list.
I also don’t like the political tone as the examples aren’t general enough that readers from any country would agree with it, it seems to assume that the reader is an American liberal who cares deeply about recent issues and has similar values to yourself. The assumptions are also wrong—low threat level if you support Trump? Try asking 8chan users if they think the government is on their side.
Your guide recommends Brave—do you know that Brave uses Google and Cloudflare and that it has built-in telemetry? To anyone who valued their privacy on the internet 15 years ago, modern privacy-focused software is a joke. There’s also more advances topics you might want to research, like using software to rewrite ones messages to get rid of ones personal ‘fingerprint’. If somebodies grammar is wrong, the manner in which it’s wrong can hint at their country of origin. Do you know of that one famous geoguessr guy? What he’s doing is possible with more than just locations

StartAtTheEnd 27 Oct 2025 1:37 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Yeonwoo Kim’s comment on: I take antidepressants. You’re welcome
I can give you lots of small examples of different things, hopefully you can use these or become inspired to try similar things.
One thing I did was ask myself a lot of difficult questions. As you’d expect of a depressed person, I came up with a lot of negative answers—but I kept catching myself lying. None of the negativity was actually true. Every time, the truth was something neutral or even positive, I just needed the courage to actually consider the question. When a doubt or problem is resolved, you will experience relief, something will “click”, and you should feel a burst of energy. As with phobias, most fantasies are much worse than reality could ever be, so they shrink when confronted. Speaking of which, the experience of the world is a projection of oneself, everything is colored by ones mood and way of thinking. Difficult philosophical questions are always symptoms rather than causes, but you do feel better if you solve one (although some of them have no asnwer). You will see what you look for, and your experience will be filled with whatever you focus on. Perception is a filter and interpreter. As for the “real” perspective, it does not exist.
I tended to my mental associations, and noticed that they had become tainted/stained, and decided to clean them up. For instance, I might love the taste of cola, but dislike the Cola company, and drink it with the knowledge that I’m drinking dangerous sugar water which is harmful to my teeth. My brain is basically mixing the pleasant experience with related unpleasant knowledge, ruining it. But why? Harmful things are not more harmful just because one enjoys them. It’s all the brain making itself misery as a way of defending itself (usually against imaginary worries).
You might also remember enjoying a soft bed as a child, actually savoring it, but notice that you as an adult connect the bed with negative things like dust mites, the price of the bed, the effort of making it look nice… In short, that you reject things as you experience them, because you deem them unclean or hostile in a way. A place which feels like home is an entirely different experience from a place which feels public or hostile, and I think that high neuroticism pushes one away from the homely perception. I think this might also harm sleep quality, because why wouldn’t it? If you think your environment is hostile, your brain will prefer light sleep, and you’ll never feel at ease. But more importantly, the difference in experience is like hugging a family member vs hugging a stranger, in the latter case, you reject the experience you have as you’re experiencing it—you feel less, you create a barrier between yourself and the moment (this is likely similar to the causes of derealization/depersonalization) and close off yourself to the world.
I tried recalling earlier versions of myself (e.g. childhood) and to reconnect with perspectives which gave things more value. I started thinking more locally and subjectively, and to allow myself to participate in things rather than being a passive observer. I also decided to be more vulnerable (this is basically the same as being open) and to make my mind a less brutal place (if the pressure is too high, pleasant thoughts scatter immediately, and softer aspects of ones personality go into hiding). I lowered my standards a bit as to raise the baseline value of everything, focused on the journey rather than the destination. I also started seeing successes as gains, rather than imagining ideal futures and considering deviations from them as losses.
I also reflected over morality and things like egoism a lot. It turns out that society had told me a lot of wrong things, and I started following the actual rules rather than the ones I was taught. I also allowed myself to be myself, which gave me back some agency and identity.
A short, practical method is to start with something that you want to be true, and then looking for evidence that it’s true. Your brain will find it, and then update its beliefs accordingly, it’s good at that. A mechanism which might work against you would be your brain looking for flaws in positive beliefs in order to protect you against disappointment and such, it’s also really good at that. This doesn’t mean that the thing in question is true or false. The truth actually doesn’t matter too much. Belief, confidence, meaning—they’re basically self-fulfilling. Anything is possible in the mind. Reality has limits, but they’re not as relevant as they seem, and your well-being doesn’t depend on what’s true, but what you believe to be true.
Finally, think about Vikings. Their version of heaven is one filled with war. They managed to find meaning and value in something which terrifies most people today, and who is to say that their interpretation is wrong? Reflecting over how seemingly negative things are necessary helps one to appreciate them. I also find that there’s beauty to be found in most things, and that beauty is also anti-nihilistic.
I could keep going like this for multiple pages, and every example listen here can also be expanded to multiple pages. I’m not sure which part here is the most useful.

StartAtTheEnd 20 Oct 2025 16:05 UTC
6 points
1
on: Meditation is dangerous
Of course it’s dangerous. If it wasn’t, then it couldn’t be helpful. Meditation allows you to break things, and the effects will be felt as positive if you break something unwanted, and harmful if you break something wanted. It’s not that there’s good and bad consequences which are opposites, there’s merely consequences which are perceived as positive or negative.
I might end up depressed if I break a core belief which is currently protecting me. I might also feel like a weight has been taken off my shoulders if I break a self-imposed limitation which has overstayed its welcome, or if I manage to accept something which is bothering me (collapsing an internal conflict to either side).
If I meditate too hard, I might break an aspect of my perception. My sense of self, my desires, some perceived duality, or the ability to differentiate living and dead objects. Meditation is a blunt tool, you can’t get specific outcomes unless you know what you’re doing.
I’d like to say more, but I can’t. Everything I read about meditation is ambiguous or contradictory. Even reading many different sources, I cannot synthesize it into anything useful or specific. I’d love to know if somebody else knew anything certain (does meditation make one more sensitive, more numb, more grounded, more distant?)
Edit: Wait, some kinds of meditation (which?) can quiet the mind. But even this effect could manifest in different ways which I can’t tell apart.